ON LANGUAGE

ON LANGUAGE; Footprints on the Infobahn

By William Safire

Published: April 17, 1994

Say the word footprint, and I immediately think of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. Does this prepare me for a nanosecondary grasp of computer lingo? Not yeti; a generation of hackers, confronted with the old word footprint, thinks first of its latest sense, "the desk space taken up by a computer."

Those of us with fat footprints (I am pounding this out on an archaic, 33-megahertz pre-Pentium monster that I have to start with a crank) get the feeling that ours is an offline life. I take that new usage from a clipping about cybersex sent over by my computer multimentor, Andy Glass of Cox Newspapers. Cybersex is defined in Compuserve Magazine as " 'adult-oriented' games and CD-ROM's; steamy online 'chats'; people discussing their sex lives and wanton desires with strangers in online forums, even falling in love without having met."

The article quotes Janis O., which is the nom de ligne of a person conducting an online Human Sexuality Forum, saying, "There is nobody in my offline life that I would feel comfortable exploring sexual submission issues with." Let's not give in: online, in use since the dark ages of 1950, means "available or accessible through computer or telecommunications," with more specific senses of "connected and turned on" or "having a feature that can be used without exiting an application." (As leaving leaves, exiting enters.)

Offline is not quite the opposite: according to the New Hacker's Dictionary by Eric Raymond, it means "not now or not here"; when a person suggests removal to her off line life, as in the story of Janis O., she alludes to direct human contact, or at least nonpublic communication through E-mail for those who cannot bear the retrogression of going postal.

In The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky., James A. Fussell defines going postal as "a euphemism for being totally stressed-out or 'losing it.' " He suggests the derivation is from postal employees who have gone on shooting rampages, while others attribute the phrase's origin to not being online or using an E-mail address.

A sagan of new computer terms (that uses sagan as an eponym for "large quantity," from Carl Sagan's use of "billions and billions" on his TV series) includes cracker, not a Southern put-down but an unsanctioned hacker; like the safecracker who breaks through a security system, the shorter form cracker identifies any hacker who breaks into a computer system without authorization.

There's also the noun for a computer complaint: gritch, which sounds like a portmanteau of grouch and glitch. (Hackers will lodge a gritch if you confuse the honest hacker with the dishonest cracker.)

Cyberdom's fixation on acronyms continues: the people who brought us DOS (Disk Operating System) and CD-ROM (Compact Disk-Read Only Memory, which means you cannot write on it) have come up with MIDI, not French for "noon" but Musical Instrument Digital Interface: through this keyboard connection, President Clinton could play his saxophone without ever having to take a deep breath or inflate his cheeks. Initialese is usually a sign of laziness in neologizing, but sometimes shows imagination: GUI stands for Graphical User Interface -- the pointing to pictures and symbols called icons -- and has the advantage of being pronounced GOO-ey.

Will you find a date in time for the trackball? Think of a dead mouse, lying on its back, the tail connected to the computer. This odious extension of the rodent metaphor refers to the ball-bearing on the mouse's stomach, which can be operated by the finger, and is therefore easier when there is little desk space to roll around. The ball-bearing that manipulates the pointer on the screen is known as the trackball. (Two-sewer hitters await computerdom's use of stickball, curb ball and punchball.)

Have you met Ed? You don't want to; the weak inflection is a downer. In grammar, words like rejected and disappointed are examples of weak inflection, with the addition in Old English of the suffix -ed to form the past tense and past participle. Strong inflection forms the past tense without a suffix, as in sang and ate; computer linguists have seized on the weak -ed to personalize the past. If you've met Ed, you're finished, washed up, history. (This may be an offshoot of Ralph, the power booter: campus beer drinkers know that talking to Ralph on the big white phone is to find a commodious receptacle for regurgitation.)

Dump is in. As one who almost went broke paying for what seemed like a Nexis core dump when I couldn't follow directions to sign off and stop the cascade of data, I welcome brain dump, a useful expression to describe the imparting of everything one knows on a given subject.

Here's the latest jargon dump from Wired magazine. I was given a subscription to this electric new publication with an in-your-interface attitude by my son the former software developer (now my son the interactive multimedia producer; nobody treads water in that business). MorF? is an interrogatory acronym for "Male or Female?" This is the question posed in the People Connection "rooms" of America Online, "as conversants try to determine the sex of other occupants."

The magazine notes that when a question like "Sandy -- MorF?" is asked, the answer often includes age and geographical location, as in "F/24/Cleveland," which can lead to perfectly respectable communication and not unsafe cybersex. Try not to confuse MorF? with morph, the computer animation technique that allows figures to change from one shape to another.

Magalog, reports Wired, is "a mail-order catalog disguised as a magazine in the hope of sucking in its recipients." Interrupt-driven describes "someone who moves through a workday responding to a series of interruptions rather than the work goals originally set."

Vice President Al Gore's staff claims, without citations, that he called for a national network of information superhighways in the early 80's; I predicted two months ago that mouthful would be shortened to infoway or I-way, but it seems the German word Autobahn has provided the combining form for Gore's footprint in the sands of time.